For 80 minutes on April 17, the Christus St. Elizabeth hospital trauma team worked relentlessly to save the lives of four men injured in a flash fire at Beaumont's ExxonMobil refinery without knowing the slightest detail of what had happened. They didn't even know their names.

When a trauma case rolls into St. Elizabeth, a team of medical professionals does whatever it can to save a patient's life. Most of the time they operate without knowledge of a patient's identity, history or how he sustained the injuries.

"It's like being a detective," said Dr. David Parkus, director of trauma services at St. Elizabeth.

"We treat what's in front of us, but we don't know exactly what happened," said Tara Holder, a nurse practitioner and trauma team member at St. Elizabeth. "We're here and in the moment."

On average, the hospital treats 1,200 trauma patients a year, Parkus said. A trauma is any injury that implies imminent death. Everything else is handled by the emergency department.

About 80 percent of the traumas treated at St. Elizabeth are blunt traumas, Parkus said. They result from car and motorcycle wrecks, tractor and 4-wheeler accidents, and falls - mainly by the elderly.

St. Elizabeth does not have a burn unit like the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, where those critically burned in the ExxonMobil flash fire were taken. Seven contract workers were transported to UTMB, and 12 total were injured in the April 17 fire. Two men have died as a result of their burns.

The trauma team called into action on April 17 stabilized the patients and prepared them for transfer in about 80 minutes, said Stephanie Massey, director of St. Elizabeth's emergency department. It usually takes three to four hours to transfer a patient.

The team secured the patients' airways and pumped them full of fluids, antibiotics and pain medications, Holder said. One patient had fallen 15 feet, but the other three had second- and third-degree burns across 70 to 80 percent of their bodies.

"I've been around 15 years," Parkus said. "Burns in general are hard on everybody."